Easy to imagine if you're old enough, wasn't great though
Back in the old days, almost everything was proprietary including languages and IDEs - you would pay over a 1000 euros a year for your Delphi IDE, for any production-grade database, you would pay someone like Oracle for a database license, any middleware you would use, you would pay license fees for, and so it went. Becoming an expert at anything often meant going on courses since these tech was often not available for home-use to mess around with.
Only a few years ago, Microsoft was still following this model with its IDEs and C#, Oracle is still one foot in the old days suing Google for licensing fees even though the language was open-sourced decades ago.
In a world where everything is proprietary, you either build everything yourself or you pay for it. Luckily (most) companies have realised that by working together and sharing code, everyone wins.